Muscle Remembers: Why Gains Come Back Easy After Time Off

If you take time away from lifting, what will happen to your gains? And when you get back to training, how long will it take to get your muscle back?

Researchers at Keele University looked into these questions.

Hypothesis

Skeletal muscle ‘remembers’ periods of muscle growth, making it easier to gain back muscle after taking time off from the gym.

This occurs through epigentic modifications – DNA has ‘markers’ or ‘tags’ that tell genes to be active or inactive.

During a period of muscle growth, these ‘tags’ or methyl groups are removed, allowing gene expression to increase. If lifting is stopped then restarted again, this ‘hypomethylated state’ becomes increased, making resistance training more effective at getting gains back.

Results

12.4% increase in lean mass after reloading (5.9% more than after the earlier period of loading)

Muscle strength had a similar trend (measure as isometric peak torque).

As Dr. Adam Sharples and his PhD student Mr. Robert Seaborne explained:

“In this study, we’ve demonstrated the genes in muscle become more untagged with this epigenetic information when it grows following exercise in earlier life, importantly these genes remain untagged even when we lose muscle again, but this untagging helps ‘switch’ the gene on to a greater extent and is associated with greater muscle growth in response to exercise in later life — demonstrating an epigenetic memory of earlier life muscle growth!”

Summary

In untrained males, lifting produced muscle gains after 7 weeks. These gains went back to baseline after 7 weeks off. Lifting again for 7 weeks evoked the largest increase in lean mass (almost 100% greater than the initial 7 weeks of training).

The body ‘remembers’ past encounters with lifting and gains that are lost during time off are easier to put back on (and surpass previous levels as gene expression is further enhanced during reloading).

Takeaway

You don’t have to lift year-round to keep muscle. Athletes can rotate from bodybuilding-style, strength training, and speed/power training, and time completely off. The body will remember what happened in the past. If you cut bodybuidling-style training and then re-introduced it, any gains that were lost will come back easier than before.